Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  Maggie said, “You’re much too modest, Mr. Lehman.”

  Barray’s frown was almost imperceptible—Maggie was supposed to wait for his prompting, for her turn, not just jump in as if this were a real conversation and not a staged one.

  “Well,” Lehman said, smiling uneasily, “that’s kind of you, Miss Starr...Maggie...and please, we’re friends here, I hope —I’m ‘Garson.’”

  “Thank you, Garson,” she said with a nod and a smile.

  “But,” he went on in his pinched nasal way, “I would never try to claim credit from Dr. Frederick. He’s the man the world associates with the anti-comic-book cause, and I am happy to be his standard bearer.”

  “In my view,” Maggie said, touching a breast where pink flesh met green satin, “you deserve much more credit. It’s true, isn’t it, that Dr. Frederick—while an articulate speaker, and a dogged researcher—was not much of a wordsmith?”

  Lehman smiled again, still uneasy. “Well, perhaps. And I did help him assemble his book. After all, he did credit me in his acknowledgments. Going so far as to thank me, saying, ‘without whom this book would not have been possible.’”

  “And it wouldn’t have,” Maggie said, “because you wrote it.”

  Lehman looked as if she had slapped him. Barray’s slack-lipped gaping stare spoke wordlessly for itself.

  She said, “Ravage the Lambs was an expansion of an article about Frederick’s research and theories that you wrote for Collier’s under your own name. You ‘ghosted’ Dr. Frederick’s book, as we say in the business.”

  Finally Barray managed, “Miss Starr, this is a serious accusation...”

  “It’s not an accusation,” she said cheerfully. She glanced at Barray. “It’s simply giving credit where credit is due. Mr. Lehman...Garson...is an extremely clever man. But he’s human.”

  “Well,” Lehman sputtered, obviously getting worked up, “of course I’m human.”

  “Human,” Maggie agreed. “And he makes mistakes. Just Saturday evening he made two, in front of my stepson, Jack Starr...vice-president of the Starr Syndicate. Can we swing the camera around? He’s there at the end of the bar.”

  The cameraman complied, wheeling the big boxy affair toward where I perched on my bar stool and, with its glass eye looking at me, I smiled and waved. The camera returned to its former position. My guess would be the cameraman tightened his shot to get a closer look at Maggie.

  Who was saying, “Jack and Dr. Sylvia Winters happened to be dining at the Waldorf at the same time as you, Garson. Which I’m sure you’ll recall, yes?”

  Irritated, the little man nodded, the wings of his hair bobbing. “Though I fail to see what relevance that might have....”

  “Now, Sylvia Winters is a doctor of psychology. She has several patients in the comic-book field who happen to have business relationships with the Starr Syndicate. That’s how Dr. Winters came to our attention. You see, we had approached Dr. Frederick about doing an advice column for us, in the Abigail Van Buren vein, but with a psychoanalytical twist. Nothing to do with comics, mind you, but Dr. Frederick, as a national figure, had become something of a star.”

  Barray said, “Maggie, please—we’re getting off the topic, I’m afraid...”

  “No. We’re right on the topic. You see, just a week ago it was Mr. Lehman who planted the seed of the idea for Dr. Frederick doing a column. Right here in this restaurant. You see, after last week’s broadcast, Mr. Lehman pitched a column of his own to us...isn’t that right, Garson?”

  “It is,” he said, defiant and confused. “And later I came to your office to follow up on my proposal only to find out you’d already offered a similar column to Dr. Frederick.”

  “You did and you didn’t,” she said.

  Barray said, “Did and...didn’t?”

  Maggie’s smile oozed patience. “Dr. Frederick was already dead that morning, when Mr. Lehman came around to ‘follow up’ on his column idea. Garson only pretended not to know that Frederick had been offered a contract. Pretended disappointment that we’d taken his idea and given it to his colleague. Of course, Mr. Lehman also came to us, in part, to establish a sort of alibi. To be in our offices before the doctor’s body was discovered.”

  “You are mistaken, Miss Starr,” Lehman insisted stiffly. “I knew nothing of Werner doing a column for you.”

  “Oh but you did. Saturday night, you looked right at Dr. Winters and told Jack that if we were to hire you for the column...now that Dr. Frederick was dead...you would not need a ghost.”

  The Village’s favorite expert swallowed. “So? What does that prove?”

  “That you murdered Frederick, though there’s more to indicate as much.”

  Like the dead doctor, silence hung in the room.

  “You could only know that Dr. Winters had been hired to do the writing on Dr. Frederick’s column...a column that should have been yours, in your view...if the doctor himself had told you.”

  “That’s a lie,” Lehman said, sputtering again. “You told me about the Winters woman in our meeting!”

  “No. I didn’t. We keep such things very quiet in the syndication business—most confidential. You don’t advertise that the name on a column or comic strip isn’t that of the actual author or artist. And it was a decision we had only made the day before you came to see us. At the Harlem clinic, the night before his murder, Dr. Frederick told Jack and Dr. Winters that he’d already had one of his researchers check up on her—that researcher was you, Mr. Lehman.”

  Lehman struggled to find words but nothing happened.

  She went on: “And the other mistake you made...a small one, really, something that would very likely have come to light anyway...was signing the check at the Waldorf restaurant. Jack saw you do that, Garson. Which means, you live at the Waldorf, don’t you?”

  Lehman said, “So what if I do? I worked closely with the doctor. He needed me nearby.”

  “And you probably had a key to his suite, as well. Certainly inside access to what would be the crime scene. You are so very well known as a Greenwich Village denizen, one of its eccentric resident ‘experts,’ that it never occurred to anyone that you might be residing elsewhere. Of late, at the Waldorf.”

  “It is no crime to live at the Waldorf,” Lehman managed.

  “Well, the rates are certainly criminal. The other aspect of this murder is, appropriately, psychological. There are a number of good suspects for the murder of Dr. Werner Frederick—many seated in this very audience. But only you possessed the clever, even arcane turn of mind that would come up with a layered scheme for murder. Was the body strung up purposely too high for the chair the victim supposedly stepped off? No matter. More important is the muddying of the waters that you provided by piling bucket after bucket of Waldorf ice-machine cubes at the foot of the hanging dead man, opening the doors onto the unseasonably cool night as well, all to disguise and cloud the time of death. As the real author of Ravage the Lambs, you knew the precise comic book with the ice-block method of suicide that could indicate the killer was a comic-book reader who was, at once, avenging himself on the troublesome anti-comic book crusader, and borrowing a homicide technique from the pages of one of those very comic books...conveniently left on the top of a pile of comics on Dr. Frederick’s desk.”

  “This is outrageous,” Lehman said. “It is libel!”

  “Slander, actually,” Maggie said, “if it were false. Everything I’ve said can be proved. Under official questioning, Frederick’s editor and publisher will have to reveal that you were the actual author of Ravage the Lambs. Jack, Dr. Winters and I will testify as to the timing and secrecy concerning her role as the doctor’s ghost writer on the column, and you yourself admit you live at the Waldorf and had access to the suite. You will be fingerprinted for comparisons to prints found on that comic-book cover. And a police canvass of Waldorf employees and guests should come up with witnesses who saw you plundering ice machines on, how many floors?”

  He moved quickl
y. Whether he drew the little automatic from his pocket, or whether it had been in his hand under the table for some time, no one would ever know. But he had it now, and he jammed it in Maggie’s throat.

  “You are a meddlesome bitch, Maggie Starr,” he said.

  With the snout of the weapon dimpling her throat, Maggie betraying no emotion as he did so, the self-proclaimed expert stared at the camera eye.

  “I indeed wrote Ravage the Lambs. I indeed had the idea for the column that this woman gave to the very man who had become famous on my back, on my work. And, yes, I killed that pompous bag of gas, with pleasure and a rope. And now, you people...you people!...get up from those tables and clear a path because Miss Starr is my passport.”

  I had stepped off the stool and now I got Maggie’s eyes. The lights were bright but somehow she looked through them at me and she narrowed her gaze in what I took to be permission.

  Lehman was screaming at them now. “Move! Move! Make a path! Make way!”

  And people were getting up and tables and chairs were moving and scraping and glasses were falling over and general chaos seemed about to reign, Barray himself for once backing away from camera view, hands in the air, as if this were a stick-up.

  Lehman shoved the table over, the microphones flying, then clunking, tablecloth slipping to the floor like a lazy ghost, and the little wild-eyed mustached man slipped behind Maggie as they stepped off the small platform on which the booth sat, the gun snout poking her throat. From the front, he was blocked by her, she was tall, he was small, and had to reach up to keep the little automatic in her neck.

  But I had a side view.

  Garson Lehman knew a lot of things. He was an expert, remember? He knew that he could screw up the time of death with cold. But he didn’t know about lividity, for example, and he didn’t know, apparently, that a bullet to the head would shut him off like a switch and there would be no pulling the trigger of the gun in Maggie’s throat, not when I shot him in the head, which I did, the sound so loud, so cannon-like, that damn near everybody in the room screamed.

  But I didn’t.

  And Maggie didn’t, either.

  She just shifted to one side as the stringless marionette that was Garson Lehman dropped to the floor, leaving the inside of his head and all the brilliant things in it dripping down a framed Wonder Guy comic-strip above the booth where he’d recently sat. He was face down, a limp rumpled little figure, his hair still like wings trying to fly off his head, where the gaping gory exit wound represented the kind of horror you could only see in real life.

  Chandler was coming up, and Sylvia, too, but I holstered the gun and went over to Maggie and put my arm around her. She smiled at me.

  “Pretty decent shot, huh?” I said, over the building crowd commotion.

  “I thought maybe you missed,” she said. “I mean, you always wanted to be president of Starr, didn’t you?”

  “Not that bad,” I said. “Anyway, I was just trying to make a point.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s not comics that are violent. It’s TV.”

  The death of Dr. Werner Frederick only served to create more interest in Ravage the Lambs, which became forever the symbol of the attack on comic books, initially a key source for those “proving” the evils of comics, and later a much condemned and even derided work of spurious research, preposterous hyperbole, and ridiculous theorizing.

  Latter-day reappraisals aside, the short term was a big win for the late psychiatrist and for the Senate hearing he’d prompted. By 1956, two-thirds of comic books had disappeared from the racks, and dominant among those remaining were a diminished Americana line and Dell Comics, noted for wholesome titles like Little Lulu and various Walt Disney fare.

  Various laws in assorted states, including New York, made it illegal to put such words as “crime,” “horror” or “terror” in a comic-book title. A self-censoring group of publishers created the Comics Code, which had similar restrictions on such words appearing on covers. The industry’s own restrictions were tougher than the Hays Office on the movies or even the FCC over the airwaves.

  Ironically, the first organizer of the self-censoring group was Bob Price, who walked out of the second meeting, realizing the organization he began would surely put him out of business.

  Which it did not quite do. Price and Feldman had barely survived two failed attempts to adapt to this new anti-comics world, first a new Entertaining Funnies line that eschewed the now forbidden subjects of crime and horror for historically based titles (Pirates, Knights, Flying Aces) and contemporary topics (Medicine, Newsman, Psychiatry) aimed at teens and adults. Wearing the now familiar white stamp of the Comics Code of America, the titles sputtered and died after a few issues. So did magazine format versions of EF’s crime and horror titles, with text illustrating art sans speech balloons, like Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant—not exactly comics and thus skirting the various bans. But these, too, were noble failures.

  What saved Price’s bacon, and kept a lot of their artists alive in a marketplace where former comic-book artists tended to wind up sacking groceries or parking cars, was Craze.

  The anti-comics controversy had barely grazed the popularity of the zany comic book, which sold big numbers even when slightly watered down by the Comics Code. The failed magazine format proved ideal for Craze, which grew more and more popular in its slick new guise, and for the rest of his very successful career, Bob Price was a publisher with a single—but enormously popular—title.

  The Craze comic strip never happened because, initially, the Entertaining Funnies staff was just trying to stay alive in the witch-hunt aftermath of the Foley Square hearing. Then all their energy got channeled into converting the title from comic book to slick-cover magazine. The actual creator of Craze, Harold Kertzweil, quit after the first few issues of the new magazine version, demanding half-ownership in the title. Price fired Kertzweil or maybe he quit, but at any rate, soon Hal Feldman was Bob’s second-in-command again, taking over as editor of Craze. The two survivors of the comics war grew old and rich together.

  As for the talented Will Allison, he went to work as an assistant and sometime ghost on the detective strip Nick Steele after the death of its creator, Ray Alexander. Eventually he took over a secret agent strip, also created by Alexander, for King Features. He never did work for Starr, but he did give me a nice original.

  Soft-spoken, handsome, charismatic, Will Allison became a favorite among the fans who celebrated EF Comics as perhaps the greatest comic books of all time. Virtually all of EF’s talented writers and artists lived to enjoy their superstar status among several new generations of fans. Tales from the Vault even spawned theatrical films as well as a popular HBO television series, more violent and far sexier than the original comics had been. Doc Frederick must have been twirling in his grave, which considering how many rotting corpses walked through that TV show, made a weird kind of sense.

  Harry Barray lost his D.J. job when rock ’n’ roll took hold, but held down a talk show till his death in the 1970s, due to cirrhosis of the liver, which could easily have been my fate, but I never did fall off the wagon. I have no idea what became of that kid Ennis Williams; with its founder dead, the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem was gone by 1956. In a way, Frederick’s good work died with him while his bad work lingered on.

  Lyla Lamont quit comics and became a fashion illustrator, though she, too, was discovered by later generations of comic-book fans, celebrated as one of the handful of great female cartoonists, who had managed to make a mark in what was then a man’s world. And Miss Fortune, belatedly, achieved the status of a classic comic strip.

  Perhaps you followed the popular column “Ask Dr. Sylvia,” which was in seven hundred papers at its peak. It ran thirty years, and for many decades I remained friends—and sometimes more—with the lovely psychologist.

  Vince Sarola’s shotgunned body was found in the trunk of his car in Queens in 1955, and his distribution company, Independent Newsstand Ser
vices, like the Harlem clinic without its leader, soon went belly up. Whether my “Uncle” Frank had anything to do with that, I do not know, nor do I wish to. But in its absence, rival Newsstand Distribution, of which Calabria had a piece, flourished.

  Distribution problems conspired with the Comics Code to make titles like Fighting Crime and Crime Fighter untenable, and Bert Levinson closed up shop in ’56. Charley Bard-well, always a clever guy, became a graphics artist for NBC, working there till 1972, when he died of a heart attack. I don’t know what became of his monkey.

  Well, not the actual monkey. The fate of Bardwell’s other sidekick, I followed in the papers, and not in the funny pages.

  After the hearing, papers dropped the Crime Fighter strip by the score, and Starr folded it. After Levinson stopped publishing comic books, Pete Pine’s boozing got so out of hand that even his longtime buddy Bardwell dropped him. Nobody in the now much smaller comic-book market wanted Pine’s stuff, though he did scrounge out an existence drawing sleazy sex gag cartoons for low-end men’s magazines.

  He did, however, have a girlfriend with a job with a top advertising agency. They both drank heavily, and argued a lot, mostly about why Pine refused to marry her (seems he’d been married twice before and it hadn’t worked out). In September 1958, they went on a binge together in the girlfriend’s apartment in a Gramercy Park residential hotel. They drank for days on end, and fought violently. Pine hit her with an iron, among other things, before pushing her out the fourteenth floor window.

  The papers made a lot of it—“Editor of Fighting Crime Comic Murders Ad Woman in Hotel Tryst”—but the story would have gotten more play a few years earlier, at the peak of the anti-comics movement. Particularly if Pine had been the guy who drew the falling-woman cover that had got Kefauver so riled up at the Foley Square hearing.

  What a hell of an irony, if that cover had been one Pine drew for Bardwell. But it wasn’t. Instead it was a Suspense Crime Stories from Bob Price and Entertaining Funnies. And Price probably didn’t even pick up on the resonance when he read the Pine story in the papers. He was too busy making a mint, sticking a grinning idiot on the covers of Craze.